THE morning of “The Rite of Spring” premiere, on May 29, 1913, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, Le Figaro predicted that ballet would deliver “a new thrill which will surely raise passionate discussion” and “leave all true artists with an unforgettable impression.” That turned out to be one of the greatest understatements of the new artistic century. The passionate discussion began during the first few bars of the music, as derisive laughter rose from the seats, and soon grew into an uproar that sent Stravinsky fleeing the hall in disgust.

He and his collaborators didn’t intend to start a riot. But together with the brouhaha over the Armory Show a few months earlier in New York (where outrages like Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” prompted Theodore Roosevelt to declare, “That’s not art”), the premiere helped write a modern cultural script. Artists have been trying to provoke audiences ever since, elevating shock to an artistic value, a sign that they are fighting the good fight against oppressive tradition and bourgeois morality.

Shock long ago went mainstream, raising a question: Can art still shock today? Nudity and raw language are no longer scandalous, and decades of Modernist assaults on formal constraints have dissolved the boundary between art and not-art, high and low. The outcry over “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and “Tropic of Cancer” seems downright quaint at a moment when millions of suburban mothers are devouring the sadomasochistic fantasy “50 Shades of Grey.”

The raw, homoerotic images in the 1989 Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition, which sparked a national debate over public support for “obscene” art, would surely not get the same rise in today’s culture, where homosexuality is broadly accepted and hard-core pornography is available at the click of a mouse. And in the pop realm, where avant-garde aesthetics have penetrated advertising and debates over gangsta rap (to say nothing of Elvis’s swiveling hips) seem a distant memory, the potential to shock seems close to vanishing altogether.

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O.O.P.S.

Today shock can seem indistinguishable from scandal, less a side effect of artistic innovation than a ploy ginned up by self-promoting artists and public scolds. But many artists say that generating shock remains the duty of anyone who aims to reflect the real world back at itself. Audiences may be more sophisticated, and jaded, but it is still possible to show them something they may not want to see. “Conditions in society are shocking, and art really does become a mirror to society in that way,” said the performance artist Karen Finley, who became a national symbol for shock art during the early 1990s battles over public funds for controversial art. And sometimes that mirror turns into a magnifying glass. The furor over her politically charged work — which included smearing her body with chocolate and stuffing orifices with yams, to illustrate society’s degradation of women — had less to do with the work itself, she said, than the culture warriors who seized on it to advance their own agenda.

The filmmaker John Waters began his 1981 autobiography, “Shock Value,” with the declaration that having someone vomit while watching one of his movies was “like getting a standing ovation.” But mere shock for shock’s sake, he said recently, is “deathly.”

“If you’re shocking by subject matter alone, it’s not enough, and it never was enough,” he said. “It’s easy to shock, but it’s much harder to surprise with wit.”

To him the most shocking thing about “Pink Flamingos,” his 1972 exploitation classic that depicted the drag queen Divine gleefully eating dog feces, was the fact that people laughed. “It was a commentary on censorship,” he said. “It was about what was left once ‘Deep Throat’ became legal.”

To ask if art can still shock is quickly to invite another question: Shock whom, and where? Connoisseurs of the highbrow jolts delivered, say, by European movie directors like Lars von Trier and Gaspar Noé (whose “Irreversible” assaulted audiences with a nine-minute rape scene) might find themselves shocked at the guilt-free pleasure taken by fans of the torture-porn “Saw” franchise. And violence that might seem humdrum at the multiplex might seem shocking in a live theater, to say nothing of an opera house.

“There are a thousand different audiences,” said Vallejo Gantner, the artistic director of Performance Space 122 in the East Village. “At ‘The Book of Mormon’ the shock is all part of the fun. But it’s much harder to shock a downtown theatergoing audience.”

A “Rite of Spring”-style riot, Mr. Gantner added wryly, is “every presenter’s dream.” But if such melees are rare, plenty of artists succeed in causing deep discomfort today.

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Karen Finley in 1990, when her performances fed debates over public support for art.Credit
Dona Ann McAdams

When the playwright Thomas Bradshaw’s satire “Mary,” about a contemporary Southern white couple who keep a slave, was staged at the Goodman Theater in Chicago last year, it prompted a storm of criticism, including a review in The Chicago Sun-Times wondering if it wasn’t “a complete and total hoax designed to see just how much hokum and bunkum today’s theater audiences might be willing to tolerate before rebelling.”

Mr. Bradshaw’s plays, which include “Burning” and “Strom Thurmond Is Not a Racist,” have prompted their share of walkouts. But he insisted that at the performances of “Mary” he saw, a good part of the mostly white audience was laughing at the liberal use of racial epithets and comically genial “slave owners” — at least once they looked around the theater to make sure someone else was laughing too.

“My work puts people in the position of questioning their own reactions,” Mr. Bradshaw said. “Modern audiences expect that if people are engaged in actions that are considered politically incorrect, they should be demonized and punished in the work. And that’s not very interesting to me.”

At a recent New York performance of “Job,” his new play based on the biblical story, the audience had a similarly uncertain reaction to the graphic (and, given the intimacy of the 40-seat Flea Theater, truly in your face) violence, which included incestuous rape, necrophilia, sodomy with a broken stick, and an anatomically vivid castration that tipped the crowd into anxious titters.

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The performer Divine in the John Waters film “Pink Flamingos.”Credit
Lawrence Irvine/Fine Line Features

That kind of ultra-realistic violence has become more common on the stage, even if the context tends to be less comic. When Sarah Kane’s “Blasted” had its premiere in London in 1995, one critic, in a typical reaction, compared its scenes of rape, cannibalism and serial mutilations to “having your whole head held down in a bucket of offal.” (Many of the same critics now consider the play a contemporary classic, and its New York premiere in 2008 drew rave reviews.) And the work of the New York playwright Adam Rapp, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for “Red Light Winter,” has been both hailed and reviled for fleshing out its emotional realism with drenchings of blood, vomit, diarrhea and pus.

Such visceral shocks “shake us out of things we take for granted,” Mr. Rapp said. “I love putting dangerous moments onstage. It raises the stakes and brings out the nervous system in an actor. The audience’s nervous system will change too.”

But Mr. Rapp, whose “Through the Yellow Hour” opens this month in New York, said that people who focus on his plays’ sensational aspects fail to appreciate the deeper shock of seeing life as it really is. Especially in a media-saturated age, he said, “it can be incredibly powerful to see something real, to have things feel like they are really happening.”

But the feeling remains that perhaps some experiences should not be fodder for art, especially when the vulnerabilities on display are not just hyper-realistic, but real. Peter Eleey, the chief curator at MoMA PS1 in Queens, recalled the discomfort that ran through the audience at this year’s Documenta art fair during a performance of “Disabled Theater,” a piece by the French choreographer Jérôme Bel featuring mentally handicapped adults.

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Tanedra Howard in the torture-porn film “Saw VI.”Credit
Steve Wilkie/Lionsgate

“He essentially choreographed your own emotional reaction to the people you were watching: the question of their exploitation, their complicity, their free will, their happiness,” Mr. Eleey said. “Some people gasped or cried. You were really whipsawed around in a way that felt very close to shock.”

In putting together “September 11,” a group show mounted last fall at PS1 to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the attacks, Mr. Eleey avoided work that directly depicted the events themselves, which for some viewers is still taboo. But artists have not shied from shocking depictions of the further violence the attacks set in motion. Mr. Eleey cited the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn’s “Superficial Engagement,” a 2006 installation at the Gladstone Gallery in New York that featured gruesome photos of exploded bodies of Afghan and Iraqi war victims — bodies, as Mr. Hirschhorn put it, that had suffered “abstraction” by violence.

“Those images are indelibly shocking to people in the West who aren’t used to seeing them in the media,” Mr. Eleey said. “But the way they shock goes beyond the horrific images and gets into a broader way of implicating us abstractly in a much larger system of violence.”

Such work may seem to stretch art’s immunity plea — its argument that “we are only reflecting the brutality of the world, and your complicity in it” — past the breaking point, conveniently projecting its own exploitive tendencies onto the viewer. In “The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning” (2011), the critic Maggie Nelson questioned the lingering hold of what she called Modernism’s “shock doctrine,” summed up for her in the Austrian film director Michael Haneke’s stated desire to “rape the audience into independence.”

Not that Ms. Nelson, who teaches at California Institute of the Arts, dismisses the value of confrontation. Art still needs to “say things the culture can’t allow itself to hear,” she said. “But all shock is not created equal,” she continued. “Once the original ‘ugh’ is gone, you’ve got to look at what the next emotion is.”

That next emotion may be nothing more than a hunger for the next, deeper shock. And some of the canniest shock artists say that, these days, refusing to deliver it in the expected ways may be the most shocking move of all.

Mr. Waters, whose most recent movie, “A Dirty Shame,” featured semen shooting out of a man’s head (and hitting the camera), suggested a homework assignment to a hypothetical young filmmaker out to make a mark.

“If you could think of something that would get an NC-17 rating with no sex or violence,” he said, “you would have the most radical movie of the year.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 16, 2012, on Page AR1 of the New York edition with the headline: Shock Me If You Can: After a Century of Shaking and Rattling Audiences, Artists Still Push the Boundaries of Confrontation. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe